Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
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Diocletian himself believed he had plenty of reason to mount his offensive. Not only did Christians silence the oracles, but they, along with eunuch sympathizers in court, seemed to have been behind the fire that roared through Diocletian's palace in Nicomedia several days after the first edict was issued. More deeply, Diocletian shared with many Romans the deepening suspicion that Christians were not quite Roman; their refusal to sacrifice could mean nothing else.23
He began on February 23, 303. Dates meant everything to Diocletian. February 23 was the festival of Terminalia (Limits). Established by Numa in the distant Roman past, Terminalia was a festival of boundaries. Neighbors would gather at border stones consecrated to Jupiter, offer sacrifice, and share a meal to maintain friendly relations across property boundaries. Good fences make good neighbors, and good fences, to the Romans, were best secured by sacrifice. Rome had been founded when Romulus traced the pomerium and killed his brother to protect the sacred space of the city from violation. Roman homes were sacred, and as the pater patriae, the emperor was the guarantor of the sanctity of the great house that was the city and empire.24 Terminalia was also part of the public cult, an annual reconsecration of the boundaries that separated the sacred Roman from the profane non-Roman world.25 As Jupiter's incarnation on earth, Diocletian was especially charged with guarding the frontiers, maintaining the sacredness of Rome and its empire, and expelling any pollution that might infect it and bring down the wrath of the gods. As the high priest of the empire, he had purged the Manichaean contagion. Now he needed to deal with the Christians, who posed an even more serious threat. The sect of Christianity had grown out of Judaism, but Diocletian was perfectly tolerant of Jewish citizens. They had their own traditions and had the emperor's permission to check out of the imperial cult. But at least they had the sense to keep to themselves. These Christians were everywhere. They mixed with other Romans in the markets and even at the court and in the army. Jews could be kept in place, but it would take some fine-grained surgery to remove the cancer of Christianity.26 Rome would be saved by a baptism in blood, a sacrifice of Christian blood.
On Terminalia in A.D. 303, Diocletian issued the first of what would become four decrees of persecution.27 The first edict prohibited Christian assemblies and required that churches be razed, Scriptures seized and burned, and Christians expelled from high positions in government and the army. Christians had no recourse. Christians with legal rights lost them, and Christians who were imperial freedpersons reverted to enslavement.28 Over the next year, three further edicts expanded the scope of the persecution. During the summer of 303, Diocletian ordered the arrest of Christian clergymen, and in November of that year, with prisons bursting with arrested Christians, he issued a constitution at the celebration of his vicennalia, the twentieth anniversary of his rule, offering clergy freedom for the price of sacrifice. Early in 304, the emperor demanded that all citizens of the empire sacrifice on pain of imprisonment or death.29 Over the year this turned into a general persecution, as the bloodshed spread from the emperor's capital at Nicomedia, modern Izmir, on the Sea of Marmara, to Egypt, Phrygia and Palestine. Instead of focusing on the emperor's court, it included, at least theoretically, every resident of the empire. The edicts, particularly the fourth, were unevenly enforced. Even a single emperor was always dependent on the reliability and energy of provincial rulers, and by 303, four emperors split the empire among themselves; not all of them were as eager to persecute Christians as Diocletian was. Still, sporadic as it may have been in many places, the persecution created an "atmosphere of constant menace .1130
There had been general persecutions before. Fifty years earlier, Decius had been the first emperor to require universal sacrifice,31 and a few years later Valerian had launched a general persecution. After Valerian's capture and humiliating execution by the Persians, though, his son Gallienus recognized the church as a legal corporation, and thereafter emperors refrained from attacking the church for nearly a half century.32 The year 303 was different. Diocletian returned to persecution, with unprecedented ferocity. When the Romans put their minds to it, their tortures could be exquisite.
After the palace fire, Christians in Nicomedia "perished wholesale and in heaps, some butchered with the sword, other fulfilled by fire." Some Christians were so eager to share in martyrdom that they leaped into the flames. Some were tied up, placed in boats, and thrust out from the beach. A Christian named Peter refused to comply with the order to sacrifice. Soldiers stripped him, hoisted him naked, and whipped him until his body was a bloody pulp, his bones sticking through the flesh and skin. Still he refused to sacrifice. The soldiers brought vinegar and salt from the mess and poured it over his wounds. Finding raw meat unappetizing, even when spiced up, they decided to cook him, slowly roasting parts of his body while trying to keep him alive. He was still refusing to sacrifice when he died.33
In the Thebais, Christians were "torn to bits from head to foot with potsherds like claws." In the same place, a woman was hung upside down, completely naked. Others were torn in two: each leg was tied to a bent tree, and then the soldiers would let the boughs "fly back to their normal position; thus they managed to tear apart the limbs of their victims in a moment." A Christian woman in Antioch convinced her daughters that they should preempt the persecutors by seeking safety in death, and they threw themselves into a river.34
Sharp reeds were pounded into the fingers and under the nails of Christians in Pontus; molten lead was poured down their backs, "roasting the vital parts of the body"; their bowels were sliced open and sexual organs cut off. It was almost a "prize competition." Eventually the authorities determined that shedding the blood of citizens was in poor taste, a pollution of the city, and resorted to more humane methods. Eusebius's description drips with irony: "The beneficence of the humane imperial authority [ought] to be extended to everybody, no one henceforth being punished with death; they had already ceased to impose this penalty on us, thanks to the emperor's humanity." Yet imperial humanity left something to be desired: "orders were then issued that the eyes should be gouged out and one leg maimed," so that "as a result of this `humanity' shown by God's enemies, it is no longer possible to count the enormous number of people who first had the right eye hacked out with a sword and cauterized with fire, and the left foot rendered useless by branding-irons applied to the joints."35 Eusebius's catalog of maimings at Pontus seems morbid to many today, but for him it was the Christian equivalent to Coriolanus's displaying the scars he suffered for the sake of Mother Rome. Even the apostle Paul had boasted to the Galatians that he bore the stigmata of Christ.
To individual martyrs were added towns of Christians. Roman soldiers attacked a village of Christians in Phrygia, killing every citizen and burning houses along with women and children. The city was razed, Eusebius claimed, because "all those who inhabited the town without exception, the curator himself and the magistrates and everyone else in office and the whole people, professed themselves Christians."36
The total number of martyrs is impossible to determine.37 In the West, the persecution ran out of energy a few years after it began, as Constantius refused to comply and then Constantine overturned the persecution edict in 306-7. In the East, things were different. In the Thebaid, years went by when Christians were regularly put to death in groups of ten, twenty, or thirty. "At other times a hundred men would be slain in a single day."38 Despite the warnings of their bishops and priests, many actively sought martyrdom by offering themselves to provincial governors, ostentatiously tearing up imperial decrees, or otherwise calling attention to themselves. Few were chased down and arrested, and many complied quietly to protect themselves.39 Because Christianity had expanded to the countryside, however, it was no longer possible to arrest its growth. Christians in villages resisted valiantly, and the church had simply become too scattered to suppress.40
Romans could be cruel, but there is something more than cruelty behind these tortures. Romans thought long and hard about not only the pain
of their modes of punishment but the rhetoric of punishment. Punishments were humiliating but not, the Romans thought, inequitable. Romans believed criminals got exactly what they deserved. Roman punishments were often enactments of the crimes committed. Sometime in the first century B.C., one Selurus, calling himself "son of Etna," gathered an army and overran the region around Mount Etna. In Rome Strabo saw Selurus "torn to pieces by wild beasts at an organized gladiatorial fight." He was raised on "a tall contraption, as though on Etna," and then the "contraption suddenly broke up and collapsed, and he went down with it into the fragile cages of wild-beasts." His death reenacted the superbia of his rise and then his sudden and shameful fall. 41 According to John's Gospel, Jesus' death was a parodic coronation and enthronement, but for the Romans every cross was a mocking throne for rebels, especially slaves who had "lifted themselves up" above their station.42 Martyrdoms were similar. Peter of Nicomedia's martyrdom was a meal-the Roman soldiers were symbolically cannibalizing him. More commonly, the tortures resemble sacrificial procedures: human beings were flayed and dismembered and burned like animals offered to the gods. One way or another, the Romans said, Christians would offer to the gods. Timid Christians could be compelled, and the bolder ones could be made into living sacrifices. Occasionally the logic of execution was more overt. Perpetua refused to die in the garb of a priestess of Ceres, but her executioners forced it on her to show that Christian criminals fulfilled the double significance of the term "the condemned" (damnati [masc.] and damnatae [fem.]), which referred to both the offering priest(ess) and the offered sacrifice.43
PERSECUTION, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS
"Such was the mild spirit of antiquity that the nations were less attentive to the difference than to the resemblance of their religious worship," Edward Gibbon wrote from the comfort of his study. He avowed that Roman magistrates who persecuted Christians did so reluctantly, "strangers" as they were to the "inflexible obstinacy" and "furious zeal" of bigoted Christians. If Christians were persecuted, they had only themselves to blame: "as they were actuated, not by the furious zeal of bigots, but by the temperate policy of legislators, [the officials'] contempt must often have relaxed, and humanity must frequently have suspended, the execution of those laws which they enacted against the humble and obscure followers of Christ."44 Ever creative, Jacob Burckhardt found hints that Christians were plotting to convert the emperor and take over the empire, and argued that Diocletian persecuted in defense of his fragile empire; his actions are those of a man "on track of a plot."4s
Gibbon, Burckhardt and other modern historians draw a delicate veil across the horrors of the Roman persecution. Well they might. Some Roman magistrates were reluctant to force a showdown with the Christians, fearing that the Christians might make them look foolish. Officials did not want to risk giving the martyrs a victory.46 Still, it is hard to make the Romans look noble and businesslike when they are flaying Christians alive, and it is even more difficult to make Christians look like ignorant zealots when they are treated with such intense hatred.
Faced with the actual practice of Roman torture and execution, it is also difficult to maintain the common distinction between theologically motivated persecution and secular, political persecution. Voltaire hinted at this distinction. From Romulus to the Christians, he argued, Romans persecuted no one. Even Nero persecuted no one for religious belief but because Christians, carried away by their own passions, set fire to Rome. When the Romans did finally get around to persecuting Christians, it was not on religious grounds but for reasons of state, and in any case, the persecutions were not as bad as Christian apologists say. Simply being a Christian was not enough to get one condemned. "St. Gregory Thaumaturgus and St. Denis, bishop of Alexandria.... were not put to death," even though they "lived at the same time as St. Cyprian." It must be that Cyprian "fell a victim to personal and powerful enemies, under the pretext of calumny or reasons of State, which are so often associated with religion, and that the former were fortunate enough to escape the malice of men."'
In 1882, Frederick Pollock gave the distinction its classical form in his essay "Theory of Persecution.."4S Though Pollock ultimately concluded that modern states have outgrown persecution, he regarded "modern persecution for the sake of public welfare" as more rational, because more testable, than the "theological persecution" of the church and state during the Middle Ages. No one can prove that heresy endangers the soul, and persecution founded on the desire to protect people from perdition cannot be proved useful. On the contrary, modern societies, which tolerate heresy, have proven that heresy is not socially destructive, and so modern states have ceased persecuting even while laws permitting persecution remain on the books.
Even Roman persecution is more defensible than Christian. Romans had no "distinctively theological incitement to persecution." Believing they had a corner on the truth, however, medieval Christians became intolerant of error out of love for the wandering soul of human beings. Roman persecution of Christians was "tribal." True, the gods figured into the picture, but they figured into apolitical picture. Regarding the gods as "the most exalted officers of the state," Romans naturally saw Christians as either "a standing insult to the gods" or "a standing menace to the Government," but in either case "bad citizens." Christians who refused to honor the gods who are guarantors of Roman imperium were more than a nuisance; they endangered the prosperity and existence of Rome itself. Roman persecution was thus "essentially a measure of public safety." For Roman emperors, "the removal of the danger ... is not merely justifiable, but a plain duty of self-preservation."49 Romans did not persecute from bigotry and zeal, as Christians later did, but out of political necessity.
But then we are brought back to the accounts of the church historians, and the Romans hardly look like practitioners of rational politics. They look bloodthirsty, as Eusebius and others intend, but they also look like practitioners of a form of political theology. Pollock notwithstanding, the Romans did not conceive of an irreligious politics or apolitical religion. Christians were a threat to peace and security because they were a pollution that aroused the wrath of the gods. Romans sacrificed Christians to protect Rome by fending off the unthinkable prospect of the end of sacrifice.50
The closest thing we have to a rationale for the Great Persecution itself comes from Galerius, putatively the architect of the edict, who in his obese, worm-ridden, decaying old age revoked the persecution edict in 311 and asked the Christians to pray for him. In an effort to secure "the permanent advantage of the commonweal," the emperors "studied to reduce all things to a conformity with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Romans." The aim was to get Christians, who had "abandoned the religion of their forefathers" and whose "willful folly" had led them to reject "ancient institutions" and make their own laws, to "return to right opinions." It did not work. "Because great numbers still persist in their opinions, and because we have perceived that at present they neither pay reverence and due adoration to the gods, nor yet worship their own God," Galerius wrote, "we, from our wonted clemency in bestowing pardon on all, have judged it fit to extend our indulgence to those men, and to permit them again to be Christians, and to establish the places of their religious assemblies." The only demand was that they not offend "against good order."51 This might be read as a purely political justification for persecution, but the "ancient laws" and "public discipline" to which Christians failed to conform included religious laws and disciplines.52 The persecutions were not conflicts of church and state but conflicts between different visions of political theology, Roman versus Christian. Galerius saw the refusal of Christians to sacrifice as a dangerous "cult vacuum" that could undermine the welfare of the empire.53
Theological critics of Constantine have surprisingly little to say about the historical context in which Constantine rose to the purple.54 They occasionally acknowledge, with gratitude, that Constantine brought a final end to persecution, but they are as squeamish about details of the persecution as are Gibbon and Burc
khardt. This has several results. Because they are reluctant to emphasize the religious motivations behind the persecution, they make Constantine seem far more innovative than he was. Constantine was very much a fourth-century Roman soldier and politician, whose thinking about the empire was thoroughly infused with religious concerns. By giving minimal attention to the persecutions, theological critics of Constantine make it difficult to sympathize with the sometimes fawning response of Christian leaders. Eusebius exaggerated Constantine's virtues and ignored his vices, but his attitude toward a Christian empire makes more sense once we realize that he had personally witnessed some of the horrors of persecution in Palestine. Christians delivered from persecution would regard Constantine the way Poles or Czechs regard Ronald Reagan or John Paul II. These early Christians had survived through the gulag, and they were profoundly grateful to the skilled ruler who led them out.